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A 14-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Drivers

11-09-2011, 08:30 AM

Phoronix: A 14-Way Comparison Of NVIDIA vs. Nouveau Drivers

Back in September I provided the most comprehensive AMD Radeon Linux graphics comparison that took 28 graphics cards from all supported ATI/AMD Radeon product families and tested them under Linux using the latest Catalyst driver as well as the open-source Mesa/Gallium3D driver. In this article is a similar comparison on the NVIDIA side as I take most of the GeForce graphics cards at my disposal and try them under the NVIDIA binary Linux driver and the community-developed open-source "Nouveau" driver. Not only is the OpenGL performance looked at for multiple generations of NVIDIA hardware, but the thermal and power consumption is compared too. In certain OpenGL workloads, the open-source Linux driver is now faster than NVIDIA's own driver for select graphics cards in a fair comparison, but overall the NVIDIA blob still reigns supreme.

Comment

Well, I for one find Nouveau to be amazing work. Granted I'm not much of a gamer, but Nouveau works great with my 9600GT and I can't say I've experienced any performance loss in Blender sculpturing/modeling since I switched from the binary blob to Nouveau. Obviously depending on your demands and hardware configuration, Nouveau will not be a solution for everyone and for them there's the binary blob. From a purely technical standpoint it's incredibly impressive that the Nouveau guys have been able to reach this level of performance through reverse-engineering something as advanced as these top-of-the-line discrete gpu's. When the project first started I thought it would never amount to much and now it's providing me with accelerated graphics on my Linux installations, massive respect!

Comment

Maybe for 2D, but burning the same amount of power as official blobs while providing a 10th the framerate, isn't exactly "great" in my book.
I'll always buy nvidia because of their Linux support, but for the same reason I'll always install their driver.

Comment

On the "Power" and "CPU" utilization graphs, there is a comment at the top that "Less is better". I do not believe that this is what you intended, as it does not correlate with the performance data. If a part draws 30% more power, but accomplishes the task in >30% less time or performs >30% additional operations per second, then the "less is better" statement is untrue. The obvious exceptions being the idle-utilization graphs and fixed-duration tests (playing back a DvD for example).

Comment

Maybe for 2D, but burning the same amount of power as official blobs while providing a 10th the framerate, isn't exactly "great" in my book.

Well, like I said I do use it with Blender for 3d scultping/modeling and I haven't noticed (as in felt) any performance decreases. That said, I haven't actually measured the performance (given that it's been running fine I haven't seen any reason to). I was expecting Blender to become noticeably slower when switching to Nouveau and was happy when I didn't notice any decrease in performance.